see those two, Baroudi and
Hamza, starting together on the great pilgrimage. From it, perhaps made
more believing or more fanatical, they had returned--to step into her
life.

"Do you know," she said, "that either you, or something in Egypt,
is--is--"

"What?" he asked, with apparent indifference.

"Is having an absurd effect upon me."

She laughed, with difficulty, frowned, sighed, while he steadily watched
her. At that moment something within her was struggling, like a little,
anxious, active creature, striving fiercely, minute though it was, to
escape out of a trap. It seemed to her that it was the introduction of
Hamza into her life by Baroudi that was furtively distressing her.

"I always do live for the day as it comes," she continued. "In English
there's a saying, 'Eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow--'"

"To-morrow?"

"'To-morrow we die.'"

"Are you frightened of death?" he said.

There was an open contempt in his voice.

"You aren't?"

A light that she had never seen in them before shone in his eyes. Only
from the torches of fatalism does such a light sometimes beacon out,
showing an edge of the soul. It was gone almost before she had time to
see it.

"Among men I may talk of such things," he said, "but not with women. Do
you like the leaves of the roses?"

He held his knife ready above the sweetmeat.

"No; I don't want any more. I don't like it very much. The taste of it
is rather sickly. Sit down, Baroudi."

She made a gesture towards the floor. He obeyed it, and squatted down.
She had meant to "get at" this man. Well, she had accidentally got at
something in him. He was apparently of the type of those Moslems who are
ready to rush upon cold steel in order to attain a sensual Paradise.

Her languor, her dreaming mood in the bright silence of this garden of
oranges on the edge of the Nile--they were leaving her now. The shaduf
man cried again, and again she remembered a night of her youth, again
she remembered "Aida," and the uprising of her nature. She had been
punished for that uprising--she did not believe by a God, who educates,
but by the world, which despises. Could she be punished again? It was
strange that though for years she had defied the world's opinion, since
she had married again she had again begun, almost without being aware of
it, to tend secretly towards desire of conciliating it. Perhaps that was
ungovernable tradition returning to its work within her. To-day she
f